Research interests

Personal webpage

Biography

Dr Peter Schachte is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne.

Dr Schachte has been involved in programming language research and development since the 1980s. From 1985 to 1993 he worked for Quintus Corporation, where he designed and implemented many parts of the company's Prolog language runtime system, development environments, graphics interfaces, object-oriented extenstions, and applications.

In his research, Dr Schachte concentrated largely on static analysis of logic programs. He built an efficient groundness analyser for Prolog and concentrated on improving its performance by designing and implementing new algorithms and data structures. He has also worked to improve programming language expressiveness, extending the Mercury compiler to allow the development of purely declarative software components with efficient imperative implementations. To Prolog, he added the ability to manipulate global state in a declarative way, and to use universal quantification as a flexible declarative looping facility. In collaboration with research students, he investigated secure network protocols, aspect-oriented programming, static checking of program binaries, the design and implementation of a purely declarative imperative programming language, automatic parallelisation of declarative programs, and improved automatic memory management.